Joachim Bretschneider

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Archaeology

Cyprus and the northern Levant with the kingdom of Ugarit were affected by drastic socio-cultural changes shortly after 1200 BCE, the causes and effects of which remain discussed. This paper summarizes some of the most recent research, taking both historical and archaeological sources into consideration. Within this supra-regional analysis, special...

Since 1999 a Syro-Belgian excavation team led by Prof. Joachim Bretschneider (UGent) has been exploring the past of Tell Tweini (Ancient Gibala) on the coast of Syria. After eleven years of excavation on Field A adequate data has been uncovered, examined and interpreted to generate a standardized work on the subject of the site’s chronology. The ce...

Archaeological and ethnographic sources provide evidence for the practice of marking objects of all sorts by a variety of means in many different cultures around the world. In the Eastern Mediterranean of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, the preponderance of extant evidence is in the form of marks impressed, incised, or painted on ceramic vesse...

Compared to Cyprus and the Aegean, the Levant suffers from a noticeable dearth of ship imagery for the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and Early Iron Age (EIA) periods alike. To make matters worse, a disproportionate number of the representations come from outside the Levant itself – chiefly from Egyptian, Assyrian, and Cypriote sources. Thus of the forty th...

Eleven years of excavation on Field A yielded a small but noteworthy assemblage of glyptic material. Thirty objects – cylinder seals, stamp seals as well as rollings and impressions of seals – produced 22 distinct designs, stemming from contexts encompassing the Middle Bronze Age II until the Iron Age III. One seal impression was unearthed from Fie...

Tell Tweini or ancient Gibala is located in the Syrian coastal plain and represents the southernmost harbour of the Ugaritic Kingdom in the Late Bronze Age. As one of the few sites under excavation in the Northern Levant with a full archaeological sequence spanning the Early Bronze Age IV (ca. 2400 BCE) up to the Iron Age III period (ca. 500 BCE),...

In der Regenfeldbau-Region des fruchtbaren Halbmondes im Gebiet des Mittleren Ostens vollzieht sich vor über 10.000 Jahren der entscheidende Wandel vom Jäger- und Sammlertum hin zur Subsistenzwirtschaft mit der Herausbildung bäuerlicher Dorfgemeinschaften, so wie sie das neolithische Jericho und Çatalhöyük belegen. Grundlage dieser, für die Menschh...

The aim of the joint Saudi Arabian-Belgian Al-Ghat field project was three-fold: the study of the iconographical and textual material incised on rocks, a survey and study project looking for early human activity in the area, and the topographical documentation of significant sites. The rich textual and iconographic material in the Wadi Markh area a...

Pyla-Kokkinokremos, located just to the east of Larnaca Bay on top of a naturally fortified plateau, represents a singularly short-lived settlement in the island’s Late Bronze Age history. Established only a few decades prior to its eventual abandonment in the early 12th c. BC, the settlement represents a very valuable ‘time capsule’ of the Late Cy...

The new excavations have also confirmed the surprising ethnic mix of material culture at Pyla: a Minoan amphoroid krater together with Cypriote pithoi and Canaanite jars in Sector 4, a Cypriot spindle bottle together with imported deep bowl and mug rhyton from the central plateau Trench 3.1, or a Canaanite jar, Mycenaean stirrup jar, Cypriot storag...

The steppes of northern Mesopotamia near the Khabur River in present-day Syria are home to the ruins Of numerous ancient cities. One city, Nabada, excavated by a Syrian-European mission under the direction of Antoine Suleiman and Marc Lebeau, close to the modern village of Tell Beydar, reached its peak of prosperity around the mid-third millennium...